Ian McEwan’s last book, 2019’s The Cockroach, was a petty-hearted Brexit fable and Kafka spoof. Instead of a man waking in the body of a bug, a bug wakes in the body of the British prime minister. Ensconced at No 10, the insect PM sets about creating a squalid paradise for his fellow critters – a septic isle. It’s not hard to reduce the UK to filth and ruin: just give the idiot humans exactly what they want.
The Cockroach was less a satire than a sneer, a book that set out to entrench rather than interrogate the divisions that led to Brexit. It was all carapace, no guts: a testament to the easy, insular comforts of self-righteousness. It seemed McEwan had finally succumbed to that curmudgeonly old cliche, the young renegade turned sour and incurious. And so, when it was announced that the veteran author’s new novel would be a 500-page sociopolitical epic – “a chronicle of our times” – it was hard not to be wary. Even the title felt like a scold: Lessons.
